Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (review)

Goeser’s Picturing the New Negro contributes an important yet essentially ignored dimension to the scholarship about the Harlem Renaissance—the role of visual imagery in helping to shape a “modern black identity.” She offers a close thematic and stylistic reading of the illustrations that appeared on various covers as well as in magazines, novels, scholarly books, and advertisements. The “modernity” of these illustrations, both in content and form, is the central issue that the author addresses. She introduces an extensive range of individuals (black and white), whose names rarely appear in the literature about the Harlem Renaissance. Yet she also understands that illustration is more than iconography. As a form of advertisement, it links to the larger consumer economy that emerged in the early twentieth century—a modernist medium connecting art, and those involved in its creation, to the marketing demands, concerns, and techniques of commercial culture.

To account for the artist’s imaginative conception of black identity as a form of modernist expression, Goeser draws upon Barker’s and Gates’ understanding of “Afro-American discursive modernism” (the language of trickery) to situate the artist in the larger cultural field of the 1920s (270).¹ Thus, Douglas, and many others, used illustration to subvert the racial stereotypes of the day while portraying African Americans as socially, intellectually, and culturally sophisticated.² Although the primary emphasis was to challenge the racial attitudes of whites, Goeser also notes that female illustrators—women such as Joyce Carrington, Elanor Paul, and Gwendolyn Bennett—also challenged the image of women that black male illustrators presented in their works. Thus, whereas males often tended to present women as “timeless ideals” of beauty and culture, and men as ready to enter the modern economy, women illustrators often linked women with the “beauty culture” of the day and/or presented them as no less ready than men to assume entrepreneurial roles. To be modern was also to understand that modern images of race and gender did not exclude homosexual relationships and transvestitism as well as boundaries that crossed racial lines.

Goeser’s reading of the images fashioned to construct both a “usable past” and a “usable present” is an important complement to previous literature about the Harlem Renaissance. Less successful is her suggestion that the reading audience of the day understood these illustrations as she does. She uses Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to demonstrate that bold illustration was especially suited to capture the attention of the modern reader—“the preoccupied consumer” (40). But when she addresses the questions of who exactly were the modern readers and whether they were further distinguished by class, race, and gender, her answers provide little evidence beyond her own imaginative insights.